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In September 1943, Primo Levi took to the mountains in northwest Italy to escape theNazis. A keen mountaineer since the age of 14, for Levi the Alps had long been asanctuary for physical release and spiritual recovery. High up in the alpine tundra, heexulted in hard battle with the elements, the same “Mother-Matter” he confronted at theChemical Institute in Turin, where he worked as a chemist on the molecular structure ofcarbon. The mountain’s geological morphologies, the combined sense of its instantcreation and eternal presence, the fellowship amongst climbers roped together acrosspleated terrains: these had been Levi’s greatest pleasures. “Evenings spent in a mountainhut,” he later wrote in a short story called “Bear Meat” (1960), “are the most sublime andintense that life holds.” But after the Nazis established Mussolini’s Republic of Salò andoccupied the north of the country, intensifying the roundup and deportation of Jews, the“rocky gymnasiums” became his place of greater safety. 

Levi had never intended to pursue armedresistance against the Germans. “I was a youngbourgeois pacifist and I’d rather have died thanshoot anyone”, he recalled in an interview with his

Primo Levi, Mountain RebelLevi's experience as a partisan—and the execution of two teenage boys—showed him humans' capacity for extreme violence.

BY GAVIN JACOBSON

December 15, 2015

Russian State Archive / Wikimedia Commons

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PRIMO LEVI’S RESISTANCE: REBELSAND COLLABORATORS IN OCCUPIEDITALY by Sergio Luzzatto Metropolitan

Books, 304 pp., $30.00

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF PRIMO LEVIBY PRIMO LEVI, edited by Ann GoldsteinLiveright, 3008 pp., $100.00

biographer, Ian Thomson. Like a lot of ItalianJews, he thought the best option was to wait foran Allied liberation. But Nazi-Fascism presentedan unforgiving choice for most Jewish citizens ofoccupied Europe: hide, resist, or, as Arendtdocumented in Eichmann in Jerusalem, cooperate.Levi’s initial concern was for the safety of hismother and sister, and on September 9 they leftfor St. Vincent, a spa town 100 kilometres northof Turin in the Valle d’Aosta, where they stayedwith friends. But after the Nazis drowned forty-nine Jews in Lake Maggiore near Switzerland,including Levi’s uncle, Mario, any hesitations hehad about armed resistance disappeared. OnOctober 1, along with a couple of disbandedItalian soldiers, as well as other Jewish refugees and anti-fascists, Levi became part of asmall and shambolic resistance group.

Sergio Luzzatto’s newly translated Primo Levi’sResistance: Rebels and Collaborators in OccupiedItaly is the story of Levi’s time as a partisan.Drawing on materials housed in local archivesthroughout northwest Italy, as well asinterviewing many of those involved in the earlyResistance, his book is a micro-history of whathappened in the two months between Levibecoming a partisan and his arrest anddeportation to Auschwitz in December 1943. Themost intriguing part of Luzzatto’s story, though, isan event that took place a few days before Levi’scapture, when his band executed Fulvio Oppezzoand Luciano Zabaldano, two teenagers accused ofthreatening the secrecy and survival of the rebelgroup. After the war, Levi remained disturbed bythe execution, and questioned the lengths peoplein conditions of weakness go to survive. Hiswritings were not just shaped by his experience of

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Auschwitz, but by a life at the frontier of powerlessness as both a partisan and aprisoner. 

It is still Levi the prisoner that we know best, and this is whatinforms much of his writings. Levi recorded his experience of the Holocaust in If This Isa Man (1947), and over the following decades gained success as a writer who, withastonishing self-control, chronicled Europe’s tragic danse macabre. Yet as Ann Goldstein—editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi—notes, the tag “Holocaust writer” doesLevi “a regrettable injustice”. A remarkable three-volume set of memoirs, novels, shortstories, essays, commentary, book reviews, and poetry, the Complete Works now enablesus to appreciate the tangle of forms and identities that defined Levi as a writer:memorialist and fantasist, scientist and sensationalist, puritan and jester, poet andpolitical commentator.

What most clearly stands out from this body of work is the experience of violence inservice of the absolute—absolute racial purity, for example, or absolute security andfreedom, or absolute control over people through force, or even the absolute mastery ofthe material world through scientific endeavor. He even argued that “perfect happiness”was unattainable, owing to the certainty of our death, nor “perfect unhappiness”, sincedeath saves us from the daily agonies of existence. For Levi, then, the twentieth centurywas so violent because societies strove for the absolute and infinite, and much of hiswork documented the experience of the powerless when confronted by that ambition. 

In contrast to fascism’s hate of difference and irregularity, Levi celebrated the finegradations of being in The Periodic Table (1975), a memoir of his life in chemistry:

Natural Histories, a collection of Huxley-esque science fiction stories first published in1966, is another example of the cohabiting themes and anxieties that imprintedthemselves on Levi after what he witnessed between 1943 and 45. Written in an

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and theimpurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is know, if it is to be fertile. Dissension,diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them,forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist…. Immaculate virtue does not existeither, or if it exists it is detestable.

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absurdist key, he mixed the potential of science to attain absolute control andunderstanding of the physical universe with a deep paranoia of its subversion by the wildspirit of the innovator, the unpredictability of experimentation, and the consequences ofhuman vanity. 

In “Angelic Butterfly,” one of Levi’s most disturbing fictions, Dr Leeb, a researcher basedon the Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele, transforms humans into birds, which are thendevoured by hungry crowds (the story takes place in post-war Germany, which Levi saidwas “a civilized form of reprisal”). Similarly, “Versamnia” is about the attempt to convertcomplete pain into pure pleasure, during which the human subjects loose their mindsand the inventor commits suicide. And in “The Magic Paint,” in which Levi displays adark comedic genius, it is the pursuit of everlasting luck that causes death. Havingdiscovered a paint that brings good luck to anyone exposed to it, the scientist-narratorcalls on an old friend, Michele Fassio, whose gaze from the right eye brings him eternalmisfortune. After having the right lens of his glasses coated in the magic paint, Fassioputs them on and dies immediately—the lens was concave, reflecting his powers of badluck off the paint and back into himself, a “blameless victim of our experiment”.

But Levi wasn’t just concerned with the tragic, usually violent,consequences of pursuing the absolute. He also grappled with the origins and nature ofthat violence. As a partisan, he participated in a brutal execution in the winter of 1943,and as a Jew he witnessed the industrial murder of entire peoples. Both issued, indifferent magnitudes, from what Levi called “the sleep of reason”. But they also resultedfrom contrasting positions of power: the paranoid fragility of the early partisanmovement on the one hand, and the “indiscriminate power” of Nazi Germany on theother. Levi’s writings are not celebrations of the human spirit, as is so often claimed, butreflections on the effects that power and powerlessness have on the human capacity forviolence. 

Levi’s mountain rebels in Aosta were too weak and inexperienced for effective guerrillawarfare. His only weapon, he recalled, was a tiny pistol, “all inlaid with mother of pearl,the kind used in movies by ladies desperately intent on committing suicide”. The group’sleader, Guido Bachi, would later admit that they weren’t really partisans at all, butsimply “refugees—Jews on the run”. Many rebels also mistook banditry for resistance.Partisans were free from the codified norms of national armies, and could devise their

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own protocols. Young men, armed and proud, descended into towns and villages in thename of resistance and assaulted locals, hijacked cars, plundered food, and burntproperty—willful violence cloaked in the mantle of anti-fascism.

Luzzatto ascertains that Oppezzo and Zabaldano’s unruliness ultimately led to theirexecutions. They had terrorized locals around the village of Amay, threatening todenounce to the fascist authorities anyone who tried to prevent them. On 8 December1943 they joined up with Levi’s band of rebels. The next day, their new alpine comradesexecuted them. There was no trial, no solemn march to a remote clearing wheredeadeyes lined up and fired. The killing was sudden and without warning, a volley ofbullets in the back as the youngsters walked through the snow—it was known as “theSoviet method.”

Luzzatto is less concerned with who actually shot them. What’s important is the severityof the punishment, which, he writes, Levi’s partisans “can only have arrived at aftersearching their consciences”. The decision to execute was a collective one, which Levigranted in The Periodic Table. In the chapter ‘Gold’, an account of his arrest andimprisonment by fascist militiamen, he admitted publicly for the first time his part in the‘ugly secret’: 

Like so much of the early days of anti-fascist resistance, seen close-up, the application ofphysical force is stripped of all romanticism. Levi’s partisans weren’t indomitable heroesin steadfast pursuit of victory. Even if their original intentions were good, they wereneophytes who, weak, powerless, and desperate to survive the Nazi dragnet, turned toviolence and immediately regretted their decision (Levi said that afterwards, they lostthe will “to resist, even to live”).

Levi’s participation in the execution is well known. Ian Thomson mentions it in hisbiography Primo Levi, as do Carole Angier in her book about Levi The Double Bond andMyriam Anissimov in Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. But Luzzatto zeroes-in

an ugly secret weighed on us, in every one of our minds…. Conscience had compelledus to carry out a sentence, and we had carried it out, but we had come awaydevastated, empty, wanting everything to finish and to be finished ourselves; but alsowanting to be together, to talk, to help each other exorcise that still so recentmemory. Now we were finished, and we knew it; we were in the trap, each one in hisown trap, and there was no way out but down.

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specifically on this episode, and in so doing, is more judicious and systematic. He writeswith verve (rendered beautifully into English by Frederika Randall), and has mined agreat many sources to provide a decent account of life under arms in the Aosta Valley.

Yet his conclusions are no more assured than previous interpretations. It still remainsunclear how much Levi was involved beyond the debate to execute (was he a triggerman, for example?). Nor whether the lawless behavior of Oppezzo andZabaldano was the real reason for the execution. It also cannot be proved that Leviparticipated in the burials of the two teenagers. Luzzatto speculates that he did, pointingto his poem ‘Epitaph’ (1952) that is “far from any kind of historical proof”, but thatprovides the strongest suggestion. The narrator in the poem is a dead partisan, buriedbeneath the soil of Aosta. Like Oppezzo or Zabaldano, he was condemned to death by hiscomrades:

Here where my comrades dry-eyed buried me, […]I, Micca the partisan, lie here. Brought down by my comradesFor no small wrong, and not many years ago,Nor many years did I have when I met the night.

The sporadic clues in Levi’s writings that allude to his “ugly secret” are tantalizing intheir promise to yield more treasure about a darker past. Luzzatto’s book is in parthostage to this temptation. He readily admits that he might be “insisting on a very minorepisode in the overall experience of the Italian Resistance, not to mention in PrimoLevi’s personal existence.” A harsh conclusion might be that this book is, above all, aboutthe imaginative license the historian has when confronted with patchy source material.

It is, however, clear that the experience of the execution deeplyinformed Levi’s writing and thought. Levi forged his voice in opposition to neat moraldistinctions like good and evil, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice, honesty anddeceit, strength and weakness, perpetrators and victims, and life and death. For him,these coexist in one and the same person in precarious balance. While he never deniedthe goodness of human nature, the essential truth of his works—filtered through hisexperiences of Europe between 1943-1945—is that powerlessness, too, or desperateweakness, manifests itself in the baser part of our natures. What else can the absolutelypowerless do when confronted by absolute power?

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In The Drowned and the Saved (1986), his final work on Auschwitz written one yearbefore his suicide, he described those who survived, like he did, as driven by despair toall forms of egoism, violence, insensitivity, and collaboration. Only the “drowned”, thosewho never returned, “did not plumb the depths” of moral compromise: “The best alldied”. This was not to condemn the “saved”, only to recognize that powerlessness servedto accelerate the violent and calculating potential within men and women. This, ifanything, was the true sign of victimhood—being forced to unlock the darker side ofhuman nature.

Like the mythical creature the centaur, a symbol of man’s liminal status, humans, Levibelieved, live in a state of tormented oscillation between conflicting moral drives, suchas virtue and cruelty, truthfulness and deception, courage and cowardice. (NaturalHistories also contains a fable called “Quaestio de Centauris,” in which Levi imaginedhimself as half man, half horse). In conditions of extremity, like a death camp, thatoscillation is of course more radical. But it was also a state of being Levi recognizedduring his time as a partisan, as he put it in the poem ‘Partigia’ (1981):

What enemy? Every man’s his own foe,Each one split by his own frontier,Left hand enemy of the right.Stand up, old enemies of yourselves,This war of ours is never done.

Luzzatto examines Levi as someone who, after being part of an execution, was aware ofbeing “split by his own frontier” between wanting to do good on the one hand, and beingcapable of extreme violence and bloodshed on the other.

Levi’s brief account of life in the Resistance in The PeriodicTable was published in 1975, a moment in Italian history when the Resistance wascelebrated with unqualified certainty. To portray it as something less than whollyvirtuous—and as something that led to his eventual imprisonment in Auschwitz—was anexample of his characteristic honesty. Levi knew better than most that the fight againstNazism was an undeniable good mixed with incidents of profound wrong. No humanwas entirely free of these ambiguities. For him, categories of good and evil aren’t to befound in extremis, only choices and compromises.

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Primo Levi’s Resistance provides the most in-depth account of the most formativeexperience of Levi’s outside of Auschwitz, and reveals a side of Levi we’re not used toseeing—a man implicated in a most pointless killing. The significance of The CollectedWorks is that it gives us a far more eclectic and interesting writer, one who ranged acrossa vast intellectual terrain that included astronomy, history, linguistics, classicalliterature, art, current affairs, memory, and religion. Together, the books not only showthe formative effect violence as both a partisan and a prisoner had on his writings, aswell as the fundamental relationship between violence and powerlessness. 

They also display the basic honesty of Levi’s work: the human condition as one ofcountless moral shades. Perhaps that is why, away from writing, he lovedmountaineering, because of its refreshing certainties. Spared of the complications ofhuman existence, which he celebrated but found so exhausting, rock climbing camedown to nothing more than the strength of a piton driven into the mountainside. As hewrote in The Periodic Table: “the rope holds or it doesn’t”.

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Q&A with Sergio Luzzatto author ofPrimo Levi’s ResistancePosted on January 20, 2016

by Sergio LuzzattoNo other Auschwitz survivor has been as literately powerful and historically in�luential as PrimoLevi. Yet Levi was not only a victim or a witness. In the fall of 1943, at the very start of the ItalianResistance, he was a �ghter, participating in the �rst attempts to launch guerrilla warfare againstoccupying Nazi forces. Those three months have been largely overlooked by Levi’s biographers;indeed, they went strikingly unmentioned by Levi himself. For the rest of his life he barelyacknowledged that autumn in the Alps. But an obscure passage in Levi’s The Periodic Table hintsthat his deportation to Auschwitz was linked directly to an incident from that time: “an ugly secret”that had made him give up the struggle, “extinguishing all will to resist, indeed to live.”

What did Levi mean by those dramatic lines? Using extensive archival research, Sergio Luzzatto’sgroundbreaking Primo Levi’s Resistance reconstructs the events of 1943 in vivid detail. Just daysbefore Levi was captured, Sergio Luzzatto shows, his group summarily executed two teenagers whohad sought to join the partisans, deciding the boys were reckless and couldn’t be trusted. The brutalepisode has been shrouded in silence, but its repercussions would shape Levi’s life.

Combining investigative �lair with profound empathy, Primo Levi’s Resistance o�fers startlinginsight into the origins of the moral complexity that runs through the work of Primo Levi himself.

A Q&A with Sergio Luzzato

               

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Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist,writer, and Holocaust survivor.

Image is in the public domain viacWikimedia.com

To what do you credit your “powerful curiosity,”verging on obsession, about Primo Levi and the ItalianResistance in World War II?

Such a powerful curiosity is only natural. The ItalianResistance is the founding event of modern Italy as afree and democratic state. And Primo Levi is anextraordinarily thoughtful interpreter of the heart ofdarkness of the twentieth century. I was thereforeobsessed �rst and foremost as a citizen, then as ahistorian. But I trust that my obsession was notpathological. I would rather refer to the Latin origins of“obsession”: an idea or image that occupies the mind,and goes as far as laying siege to it.

Why do you think Levi chose not to disclose moredetails about his brief participation in the ItalianResistance in his autobiographical works? And whatalerted you to the particular importance of those fourpages in The Periodic Table where Levi describes histime in the Resistance?

I think that Levi did not share more about his experience because he wasn’t able to look at theResistance the same way as he looked at the Holocaust. He wasn’t able to look at that side oftwentieth century history through the scientist’s lens—to �lter, gauge, distill, as chemists do—ratherthan through that of a humanist.

It is this di�ferent approach and tone, and his di�ferent attention and intention, that alerted me tothose four pages in The Periodic Table. How is it, I asked myself, that when Levi talks or writes aboutthe Resistance he is so di�ferent from the Levi we know, so much so that he almost seems to beanother person?

Did you expect the controversy that followed the Italian publication of this book? How did youhandle that?

To be honest, I expected it. I expected controversy around the Resistance, given that when Italiansre�lects on their twentieth century past, they rely so o�ten on myth rather than on reality. Peoplewant to see only virtues on the side of the partisans, only absolute evil on the other side. I alsoexpected controversy around Primo Levi, since he too is so o�ten regarded as a kind of saint ratherthan a human being.

How did I react? I was disappointed by the accusations. But I believe it is the historian’s job toexpand our knowledge, to illuminate what actually happened. Treating the partisans not as abstractheroes but as real people honestly struggling to do the right thing is the best way to honor theirmemory.

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Your personal passion for the subject matter adds so much to this history. How did your personalengagement with the material a�fect your research?

This research particularly a�fected me since the subject matter—the Italian Resistance and PrimoLevi—are the two poles of my moral and civic world. But this passion notwithstanding, I hope (andtrust) that I was able to maintain su��cient critical distance as be�ts a historian.

What are the biggest misconceptions about Primo Levi’s life and legacy?

The biggest misconception about Primo Levi’s life concerns his status as a survivor. Until I publishedmy book, Primo Levi was only seen as a survivor of Auschwitz. This was somewhat understandable,given the exceptional historical relevance of the Holocaust and the exceptional role of Levi as a writerand as a witness. Yet Levi was also, whether he liked it or not, a survivor of Amay, the tiny village inthe Italian Alps where he tried to �ght his Resistance. That partisan experience le�t deep scars on hisidentity, I believe.

The worst misconception about Primo Levi’s legacy, in my view, is of those who believe that the Levimonument must be “defended” against the attacks of an alleged vandal of memory posing as ahistorian. Whereas I think that the best way to pay tribute to him consists in carrying out theunceasing, necessary, inexhaustible work of research. This is one of his many lessons. A search formeaning, if not for precision; and a search for truth, if not for justice.

Sergio Luzzatto is the author of Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy,Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, which won the prestigious Cundill Prize in History,and of The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy. A professor of history at theUniversity of Turin, Luzzatto is a regular contributor to Il Sole 24 Ore.

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The Devil in the HillsPrimo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy

By Sergio Luzzatto, Translated by Frederika Randall

Metropolitan, 2016

For three months in the fall of 1943, the Italian writer Primo Levi joined a small band of partisans based in thePiedmontese Alps. More than thirty years later, Levi described the group in characteristically modest terms: “We were coldand hungry, we were the most disarmed partisans in the Piedmont, and probably also the most unprepared.” Much of theirtime was spent wheedling supplies from the locals, who were often suspicious of their aims. The rest was spent looking forammunition. According to Levi, they had nothing but a “tommy gun without bullets and a few pistols.”

In his fascinating new book, Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzattoexplains that, however insignificant Levi and his comrades may have seemed to themselves, they had attracted the attentionof officials in the Italian Social Republic. Popularly known as the Republic of Salò, after the town in Lombardy where itwas headquartered, the Republic had been formed in September 1943 when the Germans reinstalled the deposed Mussolinias head of a satellite state. Italy was split in two: in the south a government supported by King Victor Emmanuel IIIworked with the Allies, while in the north fascism persisted.

Salò took its orders from Berlin; Luzzatto focuses on how that obedience played out in a small corner of northern Italy. Hedoes so by showing how the actions of individuals made a difference in a time when so many of the larger political entitieswere in flux. One of those individuals was the zealous Police Prefect for the region of Aosta, Cesare Carnazzi. Carnazziwas eager to arrest two kinds of people: the partisans who were forming the nascent Italian Resistance and Jews who wereto be deported to satisfy the demands of the Republic’s Nazi allies. In the mountains of Piedmont, those people were oftenthe same.

On December 5, 1943 Carnazzi ordered three agents, led by a man named Edilio Cagni, to infiltrate Levi’s band of

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partisans. Cagni, “a pure and disinterested hunter of human prey,” as Levilater described him, was skilled at his work, and the agents quickly insinuated themselves amongst the disorganizedpartisans, who in this valley never numbered more than 100. A week later, after staging needless military exercises to wastethe partisans’ precious ammunition, Cagni and his subordinates slipped away to meet the forces sent by Carnazzi to capturethe partisans. Levi and his comrades were taken down the valley to Aosta where they were imprisoned and interrogated.

Levi is famous because of what happened next: he was deported to Auschwitz and through amazing fortune survived tobecome the greatest chronicler of that terrible experience. But Luzzatto insists that the short time Levi spent in hiding inthe Alps matters just as much as what came after. Primo Levi’s Resistance is about the after-effects of significant events,whether in the life of a nation or of an individual. Like so many readers, Luzzatto has been shaped by Levi’s example.Assigned Levi’s extraordinary Holocaust memoir If This Is a Man as a school text, Luzzatto emerged from the experience“as changed as an adolescent can be by the reading of a book.” Thus began “a kind of civil worship and literaryveneration” of Levi, who stood for Luzzatto, as for generations of readers, as “the epitome of civilized intelligence anddignified memory.”

But one of Levi’s memories might not have been so dignified. Many years after thatfirst schoolboy encounter, Luzzatto started wondering about Levi’s reticent descriptions of his time as a partisan. He wasparticularly struck by a passage in Levi’s autobiographical text The Periodic Table in which Levi explained what happenedonce he and his comrades were arrested. They were put one man to a cell and forbidden from talking to each other:

This prohibition was painful because among us, in each of our minds, weighed an ugly secret: the same secretthat had exposed us to capture, extinguishing in us, a few days before, all will to resist, indeed to live. We hadbeen forced by our consciences to carry out a sentence and had carried it out, but we had come out of itdestroyed, destitute, waiting for everything to finish and to be finished ourselves; but also wanting to see eachother, to talk, to help each other exorcize that so recent memory. Now we were finished, and we knew it; wewere in the trap, each one in his own trap, and there was no way out except down.

What is this ugly secret? Luzzatto asks. What kind of sentence is Levi talking about? Who carried it out? And was Levihimself involved?

Luzzatto answers these questions as fully as the historical record allows. He discovers a story emblematic of the confusionof the early days of the Italian Resistance. Luzzatto likens his task to using “a zoom lens rather than a wide angle”: byuncovering the events alluded to by Levi and by tracing their widening repercussions, Luzzatto uses “one story from theResistance to illuminate the Resistance as a whole.” He believes historians have a duty to help the present understand itselfthrough the past. The events in Piedmont may seem unimportant or even tawdry, but they have larger significance:

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It may seem a thin history, politically useless and morally futile, about men who hated other men. Yetultimately, I believe, it’s only such an intimate perspective that allows a history of the Resistance to speak to ustoday. It allows us to see that conflict as a clash between people battling not just out of hatred but because theyhave different conceptions of humanity, justice, and society. The historian too, must grapple with these people,to avoid seeing them either as saints or as monsters, and to help renew (along with the best of them) our valuesand our memory.

The story begins in the days before the spy Cagni infiltrated the partisans, when two other men joined the resistors. LucianoZabaldono and Fulvio Oppezzo were young hotheads, more interested in stealing cars than fighting fascists. Luzzatto says

they conformed to the image the Republic of Salò was putting out about the Resistance: that they were nothing but bandits. From the moment Zabaldono and Oppezzo arrived they made trouble for the partisans,extorting food from the locals, thereby exacerbating already tense relations, and even, when the partisans sought to rein theboys in, threatening to denounce their supposed colleagues to the police.

The partisans reacted swiftly. In the early morning of December 9, 1943, Zabaldono and Oppezzo were shot withoutwarning from behind. Luzzatto concludes: “the two were the very first victims of the Resistance in Valle d’Aosta. But theydid not die under attack from German or Salò forces. They lost their lives to their own companions.”

Luzzatto is unable to determine who did the actual shooting. Based on what he has uncovered about partisan justice in1944-5, Luzzatto believes the judgment would have been collective. He also notes Levi’s use of “that weighty ‘we’” in thecentral passage from The Periodic Table: “We had been forced by our consciences to carry out a sentence and had carried itout.” But in the end, Luzzatto is not especially interested in who made the decision or pulled the trigger. He doesn’tcondemn the actions of the partisans that morning in December 1943 even as he is certain that the punishment wasdisproportionate to the crime, referring to the “irreparable punishment meted out to Oppezo and Zabaldano for havingconfused adventure with banditry, and banditry with the partisan fight” and, even more baldly, to “a high-handed decisionby inexperienced commanders, a spray of bullets from a Beretta to punish the bullying of villagers or the theft of a fewkilos of flour.” In so doing, Luzzatto successfully challenges the myth of the Resistance as unimpeachable moral goodwithout capitulating to the mentality of what he condemns as “crudely revisionist antipartisan books about the Italian civilwar.”

What interests Luzzatto is whether it is possible to come to nuanced conclusionsabout a chaotic time. Here as always Levi is his lodestar. Luzzatto characterizes Levi as a man who spent his life drawingout the moral ambiguities of the fight against fascism, the way, for example, the Nazis conscripted their victims into

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perpetrating injustice, from the lowliest overseer of a potato peeling detail all the way to the Sonderkommandos, the unitsof Jewish prisoners forced to operate the crematoria. In the essay collection The Drowned and the Saved, his last work,Levi argued that none of us is ever in the place of another, which means we cannot predict our own behavior let alonetheir’s. The upshot is that we should ponder the totalitarian history of the 20th century “with compassion and rigor.”

No matter how important Levi is to Luzzatto, however, it quickly becomes clear that he is more presiding spirit than mainactor in Luzzatto’s tale. After describing Levi’s arrest and deportation—from Aosta, where his captors concluded he shouldbe treated as a Jew rather than as a partisan, he was sent to the transit camp at Fossoli, and from there to Auschwitz—Luzzatto abandons Levi for long stretches, concentrating instead on the rise of the partisan movement. He is especiallyinterested in how the actors in this struggle were remembered. Because he is most interested in how the partisans enactedjustice, he concentrates on the fate of perpetrators such as Police Prefect Carnazzi and the secret agent Cagni.

Both Carnazzi and Cagni were initially sentenced to death by firing squad, but over the nexttwo years they appealed each successively more lenient verdict. In the end, each served only a few months. Those verdicts,Luzzatto argues, were informed by the shifting sense of justice in Italy in the years after the war as the country moved froman era of “emergency and revolution” to one of “regulations and reaction.”

But these men also benefitted from some surprising personal circumstances. Despite Carnazzi’s zeal in upholding fascistlaw, he was also instrumental in saving a Jewish family from deportation. Cagni is an even stranger character: he servedafter his arrest as a double agent for the American Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), helping them toarrest Nazi sympathizers as well as informing against Communist elements in the Resistance.

In fleshing out the portraits of these two men, Luzzatto isn’t suggesting judgment is impossible. Nor is he recuperatingvillains as heroes. But he is insisting on the complexity of the past. Nowhere is this conviction more interestinglydeveloped than in the book’s final chapters, in which Luzzatto uncovers the posthumous afterlives of Fulvio Oppezzo andLuciano Zabaldono. Remember them? They were the young hotheads shot by their comrades, the ones Luzzatto calls thefirst victims of the Resistance in the Valle d’Aosta. Luzzatto travels to Oppezzo’s hometown where the central piazza andthe local school are named after him. Luzzatto recounts how Oppezzo was transformed into a martyr of the Resistance. Asa parish bulletin from 1952 put it, “During those most difficult days of the nation he saw and chose his place withouthesitation: for Italy!” This canonization bears no resemblance to the haphazard circumstances, which even Luzzatto’stireless inquiries are unable to determine with certainty, that led Oppezzo and his friend to join the partisans in the hills.

Zabaldone was similarly lionized, even though his journey from rebellious boy (he left school

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at age 12 and never settled to anything) to political rebel is even more obscure than Oppezzo’s. But he too was mourned asa hero of the Resistance. In 1945 the two men’s bodies were exhumed from the shallow graves where Levi and hiscomrades had buried them. Zabaldone was interred with two other men from his neighborhood in Turin. A funeral noticelauded their valor: “They are and they will always be alive and among us; their sacrifice will be an example and a spur toour future deeds.”

Memory is indeed alive, as Luzzatto shows, but it is more complex than the bombast of postwar Italy admits. One of themost moving parts of the book comes when the author meets Zabaldone’s nephews, one of whom has researched this unclehe never knew, this hero of the Resistance whose portrait hangs over the bar in the family restaurant. The nephew, too, hascarefully underlined that passage from The Periodic Table. He too suspects his relative was murdered in shadycircumstances. But like Luzzatto, he isn’t interested in either exonerating his uncle or in unmasking the murderers. He—and by extension Luzzatto—stand as examples of level-headed historical understanding.

Once again, Levi is the exemplar of such behavior. He returned from thecamps in time to testify at Cagni’s first trial. Searching the trial records, Luzzatto is initially disappointed by what he finds,only two terse sentences: “I was taken away and interrogated by Cagni at Aosta. I was identified by [one of the otherdouble agents], who supplied extensive information about our band and the National Liberation Committee.” As Luzzattosays, this statement is “practically telegraphic” in its concision. His disappointment turns to appreciation, however, as hereflects on how remarkable it was that Levi was there to testify at all. Here Luzzattto makes his most speculative claim: thatthe significance of the testimony lay not in what it accomplished against Cagni but “in what it did in the mind of the manthen writing If This Is a Man.” Luzzatto distinguishes “the witness Levi” from “Levi the Witness,” the former “eager forjustice and revenge,” the latter “analyzing morality and human nature.”

I wish Luzzatto had made more of this distinction. He might for example have cited the contradictory aims Levi offers inthe Preface to If This Is a Man. On the one hand, he wants the book to document “a detached study of certain aspects of thehuman mind.” On the other, he apologizes for its “structural defects,” which result from “an immediate and violentimpulse,” a need to tell his story to the world. The distinction between detachment and passion is everywhere in Levi’swriting. Luzzatto misses an opportunity to examine more carefully what witnessing meant to Levi, which might haveallowed him to develop his own argument about how historians should represent the past. Are historians supposed torecount the past, or advocate for (a version of) it? Are historians witnesses?

Luzzatto doesn’t answer these questions because, in the end, Primo Levi’s Resistance isn’t really about Levi as a writer andthinker, despite Luzzatto’s attention to Levi’s style. Instead it’s about Levi as a partisan, as an actor, as someone who didsomething, maybe even something morally dubious. The problem is that we only know the latter Levi through the former.Luzzatto has uncovered a lot, but what actually happened that morning in December 1943 when two men were killed,especially Levi’s role in it, remains a mystery.

Based on the title of the American edition and the way its publisher has pitched it,readers might be surprised to find that the book is more about the Resistance and less about Primo Levi. It doesn’t help that

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the publisher speaks of a “shocking episode,” which, it hints, will make us reassess Levi’s moral worth. I wishMetropolitan had seen fit to keep the original title, Partigia, which Luzzatto takes from a poem Levi published in 1981.Partigia is a colloquial term “widespread in Piedmont” for “partisans without many scruples, decisive, light-fingered, orquick to brawl.” Zabaldone and Oppezzo were partigia, but so too, it seems, were Levi and his comrades. In a carefulreading of the poem, Luzzatto explains that “Partigia” is addressed to the retired partisans, who are urged to go back intothe mountains again in order to make sure “the enemy does not surprise us.”

Yet the enemy is not, as we might expect, revisionist history or renascent fascism or even Holocaust denial. Instead it’scloser to home:

What enemy? Every man’s his own foe, Each one split by his own frontier, Left hand enemy of the right. Stand up, old enemies of yourselves, This war of ours is never done.

For Luzzatto, Levi’s poem, which he offers as a distillation of the writer’s philosophy, refuses the consolations of good andbad, enemy and friend, right and wrong. But it doesn’t do so in favor of relativism. “This war of ours is never done”: thereare always battles that have to be fought. For Luzzatto, the story of the Italian Resistance is “a story of unquestionablegood, the fight against Nazi-Fascism, intermixed with a story of profound wrong, a wrong no human being, even the best,can say he is totally free of.”

*

Primo Levi’s Resistance deserves a wide audience. Luzzatto organizes his material about the turbulent and complex eventsof the years 1943-46 with impressive clarity. Nonetheless Anglophone readers might find themselves hard-pressed to keepup with the many names, places, and organizations. Fortunately, they will be helped by the book’s accompanying material,including a decent index and an excellent map. Yet there’s no getting around the fact that the book, although not academicper se, is specialized, and readers who approach it as a biography of even a small but significant part of Levi’s life willcome away disappointed.

Yet Primo Levi is central to Luzzatto’s argument. Because he is a writer of such ethicalnuance, so ready to offer himself as anything but a hero, Levi has paradoxically become a figure we can admire—even love—unreservedly. Luzzatto is willing to reassess Levi—his suggestion that those few months in the mountains wereformative for the writer’s later investigation of moral complexity is ultimately convincing—but he isn’t interested inmaking sensational or revisionist claims about him. Primo Levi’s Resistance doesn’t cut Levi down to size, doesn’t tarnishhis memory. Levi’s careful self-critique in his monumental body of work has rendered that superfluous.

As Levi told us so forcefully in his remarkable books, complicated, ethically fraught situations resist easy judgment. Butthey also call for judgment. Remember that what Levi needs above all in jail is to not be isolated, to engage with others. Heneeds to talk through what they have done, not in order to whitewash their terrible but necessary action, but in order to behuman: we “want[ed] to see each other, to talk, to help each other exorcize that so recent memory.” As in the poem“Partigia,” it falls to each of us to wrestle with our own complicity with oppression and violence. What is permitted in thestruggle against an enemy? Can violence be morally just? We will answer that question best, Levi shows us, if we bearwitness to the enemy within ourselves. The idea of critical and communal reflection is that Luzzatto to bring together thetwo strands of his story, one about the fate of the Resistance in postwar Italy and one about the fate of Levi during his brieftime as a member of that Resistance. Levi, Luzzatto concludes, carried “only one set of moral baggage: a notion ofdignity.” Readers are thus allowed to worship Levi as much at the end of the book as Luzzatto does in the beginning. Thatthe vision of Levi as humane and decent, modest and clear-sighted should outlast this investigation of a morally ambiguoustime is a consolation all the more powerful since Levi himself gave us the tools to be critical of just such a formulation.